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OPINION

Editorial: A county of 'haves and have-nots'

Ventura County Star
Published 4:03 p.m. PT Dec. 4, 2018

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Construction personnel work on building houses at Springville Drive and Highway 101 in Camarillo. A report from the Southern California Association of Governments will be presented Thursday in Los Angeles on the state of jobs in the region.(Photo: JUAN CARLO/THE STAR)Buy Photo

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about signs of an impending recession in our nation, but according to a new report, it may already be here in Ventura County.

The main culprit? Our lack of housing and affordability, says the report by the Center for Economic Research & Forecasting at California Lutheran University.

The report, which will be discussed at the Southern California Association of Governments’ annual economic summit Thursday in Los Angeles, lays much of the blame on “the most stringent growth restrictions of any county in the United States.”

We’re not as sour on our Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources anti-urban-sprawl laws as the economists at CLU are. We believe the county’s aversion to so-called “infill” development in existing urban areas is as much to blame.

In either case, however, the resulting lack of housing — and the price escalation it fuels under supply and demand — continue to seriously harm our local economy and quality of life. Ventura County residents need to take reports like this to heart and demand, among other things, that their cities get in line for some of the $6 billion in housing bonds approved by state voters last month.

The new report says Ventura County’s gross domestic product decreased 0.4 percent in 2017, on top of a 0.9 percent decline in 2016. “We hesitate to use the word recession, but we don’t know what else to call two consecutive years of economic contraction,” the report’s author, Matthew Fienup, says in a news release.

Even more depressing is that the rest of Southern California is performing much better economically. Yes, housing prices are rising across the region, but not as much as in Ventura County. From October 2017 to October 2018, the county’s median home sale price increased from $545,000 to $595,250, according to a CoreLogic report last week. That 9.1 percent increase was the highest in all of Southern California.

The county did add some jobs last year, but mostly in low-paying sectors like leisure and hospitality, Fienup’s report says. With home prices rising much faster than wages, the county is losing talented workers and becoming “an economy of haves and have-nots,” Fienup says.

Rents are no better. A report last year listed Ventura County as one of the 10 least affordable places in the nation for renters. And if you don’t believe it, consider that rents at the new Wagon Wheel apartments in Oxnard run as high as $3,380 a month.

Some of us like to blame housing growth for our worsening traffic. But people with low-paying jobs here can’t afford to live here anymore. Many who can afford it have high-paying jobs out of town. Others cram into overcrowded housing to split the cost. It’s the combination of all of this — not growth — that helps create the daily commuter mess known as Highway 101.

A Star story this week on the anniversary of the Thomas Fire put a face on our housing crisis. The story told of Sandie Moore, who was renting a “granny flat” in Montalvo. With the fire's destruction supercharging the remaining housing market, her landlord decided to sell the property. Moore unsuccessfully searched for months for another unit that would accept her housing voucher and eventually became homeless — living out of her car at age 75. We should be embarrassed when we hear stories like this.

The next time senior apartments are proposed in our neighborhood, a veterans home in our town, an affordable housing project down the street, we should set aside our NIMBYism and remember the plight of Sandie Moore and the economic direction of our county.